Posts Tagged: Film

The early skepticism for The End of the Tour may have been misguided. David Poland caught up with James Ponsoldt (the film’s director) and Donald Marguiles (its Pulitzer-winning screenwriter) to touch on Wallaces’s legacy, the Lipsky interview, and the process behind what’s since been deemed a “glorious casting.”

That perfect movie moment is really the sum of countless cinematic cues coming together to make us think and feel. Tony Zhou’s video series “Every Frame a Painting” examines how (and when) these techniques of filmmaking work. We’ve always been watching, but what are we seeing?

It’s a literal confrontation of his metaphorical fear, a visual take on Rilke’s words: to view Güeros is to see a “thing poem” on the screen, to witness something like “The Panther” materialize. ...more

Scary movie of the hour It Follows is peppered with intertextual references to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Ben Apatoff looks for the connection (if there is one):

If anything, The Idiot enhances It Follows more than it represents it, augmenting the film’s foreboding atmosphere with quotes from a writer who could create anxiety and suspense as artfully as any of the Russian greats.

People have been writing about civil rights for years, but it’s taken Hollywood until now to warm up to the subject (of course, not enough). Bill Morris traces the history of the movement’s cinematic representations leading up to Ava DuVernay’s recent triumph:

Movies about the civil rights movement — the successful ones– have tended to follow one of two strategies.

This shouldn’t work, but it does. Perhaps it’s that the deconstructive elements of the novel echo another part of the world of cinema: between film school and film criticism, discussion is as much a part of cinema as images projected onto a screen.

[Boyhood] focuses on the fact that we should be paying more attention to ourselves, right here, right now. It isn't asking that you be heroic, but it does ask you to be brave enough to live your life, and elevates the everyday to a higher, more melodic plane....more

For years, film buffs have been devouring companion material to the original works that captured their interest—deleted scenes, commentary, bloopers, most eagerly that much-loved paean to auteurism, the director’s cut. To accept this practice is to acknowledge the impossibility of artistic perfection; as the saying goes, “art is never finished, only abandoned.” The New Republic wonders why the literary world is so hesitant to make the same admission.

Yony Leyser, director of the documentary about William S. Burroughs, is making a feature film about Berlin’s queer community, and he needs your help to crowdfund it. Over at Indiewire, Leyser explains his desire to deglamorize the city’s dark underground scene and explore what it means to be a member of a community whose definition is constantly in flux:

I go back and forth from being firmly committed to the “queer community” to being totally and completely disillusioned with the concept and diametrically opposed to it.

From the start, All Is Lost understands what makes the survival genre great: an uncompromising dedication to what happens on the screen and a refusal to linger over why it happens or what it means....more

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Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, advice, music, film and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate and true (and sometimes very, very funny).(more)